Runner (11 page)

Christine was waiting for her around the back of the house when Jane pulled in. The Volvo was already in the garage. Jane got out of the rental car, took the keys and the garage door opener from Christine, and put them in the house. Christine stood by the driver's side of the Lincoln, but Jane said, "I'll drive a bit longer. I know the area, so I can make better time."

As Jane backed the big gray car out of the driveway and turned toward the Thruway entrance, Christine said, "This doesn't look like your kind of car."

"That's just what I wanted to hear. But it's big and comfortable and has a powerful engine, which are all good qualities for what we're doing. And it doesn't look at all like my Volvo." Jane drove off, rapidly gaining speed. She checked her mirrors every few seconds.

"What's the rest of your new plan?"

"To drive far and fast," said Jane. "We're only a few miles from where we started, and by now it's possible they know we came back this way. Buffalo couldn't be more dangerous for you if it were on fire. We'll start on the south branch of the Thruway and head along the lake toward Erie, Pennsylvania, then either turn east toward Pittsburgh or west toward Cleveland. Is there anything about either place that makes it more dangerous for you?"

"No. In fact, I have an aunt and some cousins in Pittsburgh. It's
my father's younger sister. Her husband was an incredible jerk—big drinker, big cheater—but he died of a heart attack a few years ago. She's great, and so are the kids. We could probably stay with them."

"I'm afraid that wouldn't be a good idea. In fact they're what I meant by something that makes the city more dangerous for you—somebody who knows your name isn't Linda Welles."

"They'd never betray me."

Jane sighed. "I guess it's time for another lesson." Her eyes flicked to the mirrors, studying the cars behind her as she pulled onto the Thruway. She passed a truck and returned to the right lane, then watched for a few seconds to see if any other car came around the truck.

"You sound sad. What's wrong?"

Jane glanced at her, then moved her eyes back to the road and kept them there. "When you came to me just after the bomb went off, I was hoping you were just a hysterical patient. When you told me Sharon had sent you, I knew you had to be more than that. Then I saw what was after you. You're going to have to learn everything at seventy miles an hour."

"What don't I know?"

"That I'm the last resort. A person comes to me only when the possibility of living as the person he's always been is gone. I can show you the way to sink out of sight, and come up again somewhere else as a new person. I can do it. But that doesn't mean you can. It isn't easy, and there are terrible sacrifices."

"Sacrifice? You're saying I have to sacrifice
people?
The few relatives I have left?"

"Yes. And your friends, and your enemies. For quite a few runners I've taken out, the enemies are the hardest ones to give up. But if you go with me, there's no revenge—not even in small ways. No
matter how wonderful you make your new life, no matter what you accomplish, you can never go back and show the people you hated. You can never say to your father's ex-wife, 'You treated me horribly, but now take a look at me. I've beaten you.'"

"Okay. I guess I can understand that. You think that if I do, she just might find a way to get me found or something. But honestly, I know who I can trust, and exactly how far. My aunt Mary and my cousins in Pittsburgh are just the best people. They wouldn't tell anyone where I was, and they certainly don't know anybody who knows Richard Beale."

"You're not getting this. It's not that they'd do anything to hurt you. It's about hurting them. If we succeed completely in losing the people who are chasing you, the next thing they'll do is start working the most promising ways of picking up your trail again. If Richard Beale knows who your favorite relatives are, his people will find them and see if you're there. For a time they'll watch the house. They'll probably examine the mail every day for a letter that might be from you. Maybe they'll plant microphones inside, tap the phone. If they believe that your aunt knows where you are, then your aunt will get a visit."

"You're trying to scare me again."

"Yes," said Jane. "I am."

"I know I'm a lot of trouble, but I'll try to be less. I know I'm not good at any of this, but I'm trying to learn as fast as I can. Scaring the shit out of me is just mean."

"I'm sorry it seems that way. But the last thing you want to do is put the people you care about in the position of being the only ones who can tell a man like Richard Beale where you are."

Christine sat in silence for a long time, staring out the car window across the fields at the trees gliding by as Jane drove hard to-
ward the south. When Jane looked at her again she was expecting to see tears, but Christine was dry-eyed and motionless.

"It's your father who's bothering you, isn't it?"

She nodded. "He's going to be in jail for about six more years. If he doesn't hear from me, I don't know what he'll think, what he'll feel. Nothing good."

"As soon as you're settled in a safe place, I'll go and see him. If I can't get in I'll write a letter to him that will tell him what he needs to know, but won't reveal anything else. I'll mail it someplace far from your city and far from my city. Then he'll feel glad that you're not in danger anymore."

"Thanks. I'm not even sure how I feel about trying to see him anymore. I want him to know that I love him. But it's not just me anymore. I've got to do what I can to get my baby born."

"I'm sure he'll understand that, and he'll agree that you're making the right decision."

"He's got no choice. This is the only grandchild he's going to have."

Jane didn't remind her that the two half siblings she had left with her former stepmother might have children. Christine could hardly have forgotten them. Jane supposed that Christine had already banished them from her mind the day she walked out of the house at the age of sixteen. She said, "For now, the best thing to do is stop thinking about the past, and turn your attention to the decisions you have to make next."

"What do I have left to decide?"

"We have a direction, but we still need a destination. Do you know where you'd like to live?"

"I guess Pittsburgh is out. And San Diego certainly is. I don't know. Someplace where it's not cold in the winter. I can do heat,
but I hate snow and ice. I don't know how to dress, or drive, or even walk without falling."

"Maybe Florida, then, or the Atlantic coast as far up as South Carolina. Or the southern part of Texas, Arizona, or Nevada."

"I'll have to think about it. I've never been to any of those places so I don't really know. They all sound okay to me."

"Let's try another way, then. You're going to want to find a job of some kind. Is there anything new you'd like to try?"

"Even if there were, I don't have the experience or the education for anything but what I was doing for Richard."

"What was that?"

"I was Richard's secretary. I was supposed to help with what he was doing."

"Fine. He was selling real estate, right?"

"It wasn't just sales. We did property management, and built some new housing. We did some land speculation, too, buying, holding for a while, and reselling. And we found underpriced houses, remodeled and flipped them."

"Did you enjoy it?"

"I like to work. What I was doing was okay. I think if I had my choice I'd like to be a teacher. But I never went to college."

"You're going to be twenty-one years old, according to your ID. You've got plenty of time to get a degree part-time after the baby is born."

"I can't get into a college. I'll be living under a false name with no high school diploma, transcripts, letters of recommendation, or anything."

"I can help you with all that. I'll have some college transcripts cooked up to make you look as though you should be admitted as a transfer student."

"What is this, magic?"

"No. It's lying. I know where I can get transcripts made. It's a four-year college that existed for about fifty years in Tennessee, then went out of business in the late eighties. A man I know took over the name, changed the mailing address of the registrar's office to a P.O. box in the same city, and has everything forwarded. If someone calls or writes for verification of a degree or something, he's the one who answers. For a small fee he supplies anything that's needed. He's still at it. I looked online recently and saw that Hillcliff College has a Web page."

"How can I possibly get away with that?"

"Any manufactured identity can be penetrated, but most aren't. All you have to do is behave in a way that makes everyone around you want you to succeed. You work hard, you're nice to people. The secret is to be the sort of person nobody wants to harm. Another part of that is to go slowly. You claim to be a twenty-one-year-old girl who wants to be a student. Claim to be what you so obviously are, and nothing more."

"That's it?"

"It's the start. You don't set off any suspicions, so nobody double-checks what you say. Then, day by day, you get to know people in a natural way—people in classes, at jobs, in your neighborhood. You're just a nice girl with a cute little baby, who's trying to qualify as a teacher. Your story doesn't threaten anybody, and it's not the kind of thing that confidence women make up. They're always the daughters of billionaires, or runaway rock stars that nobody ever heard of because they're from Brazil."

"I'm pregnant and I'm not married."

"Is that a big deal to you?"

"Yes. It makes me feel like people think I'm a slut."

"It's been a long time since anybody actually thought that way—at least a generation. But if it makes you uncomfortable, let's fix that, too."

"Fix it?"

"You're in the process of getting a divorce. That way, you can wear a wedding ring during the rest of your pregnancy. You won't feel as though anybody thinks of you as an unwed mother. Later, when you're ready to date, you take the ring off, and the divorce is final. If you tell people the divorce story during those months, they'll not only believe it, but later on they'll be under the impression that they saw it happen."

"You've done all of this before?"

"Many times."

"And it works?"

"It always has." Jane checked the mirrors again, then nudged her speed up a little. Her manner had conveyed a confidence she didn't feel. It had been more than five years since she had taught a person to run. Since then a thousand obstacles must have been invented to keep people from changing identities, and she knew about only a few of them. Right now, the things she was doing to make Christine safe might be killing them both.

At ten in the morning, when they were a few miles south of Buffalo in Hamburg, Jane pulled off the highway and stopped in the big parking lot of the McKinley Mall across from the Wegmans grocery store. "Are you ready to drive?"

"Sure," said Christine. "I slept really well on that last stretch."

"I know." They got out of the car and traded seats. When Christine sat behind the wheel, she adjusted the mirrors and the seat to her shorter stature, started the engine, and looked around her twice before she put the car in gear and let it glide forward up an aisle toward the exit from the lot.

To Jane her behavior was a promising sign. Jane had stayed alive this long by observing people minutely—how they carried themselves, where they looked when they walked into unfamiliar buildings, where they chose to sit in movie theaters. The way they drove a car was a huge indicator. It warned her if they were stupid, crazy, careless, or selfish.

She pretended to relax and adjusted the passenger seat so it leaned back, turned her face slightly away from Christine, and closed
her left eye. She was asleep as a napping cat is asleep, eyes barely closed and muscles ready to react in an instant.

Christine drove with a tentative quality at first, holding the wheel tightly with both hands and readjusting the mirrors once more. Jane waited and watched the window to her right, judged the speed of acceleration, and felt the deceleration when Christine applied the brakes. Jane opened her eyes while Christine got out on the main highway, and watched her test the car's power on the Thruway, take a space in the right lane and stay there for a time until she needed to get around a slow truck, then pull back in. She performed those operations with competence and assurance. She was not an aggressive driver or a timid one.

When the car crossed over into the Cattaraugus Reservation, Jane watched the familiar landmarks pass—Mile Strip Road, then Irving-Gowanda Road, and then Cattaraugus Creek and the ponds just past it. Jane closed both eyes. Christine was all right. She might not turn out to be a hero or a genius, but she was a good driver. A person who could be trusted to maneuver a metal and glass box containing one's fragile bones and tender flesh down a highway at a mile a minute was a valuable ally. In a moment, Jane began to dream.

It was night, but she was not feeling safe enough to sleep. She was in her compartment in a longhouse that belonged to the women of the Wolf clan, but her husband was somewhere else—out in the forest with a party of warriors, going south along the crests of the mountains to fight. There were always men out in the endless woods. So many men were killed in the fighting that more men had to be sent out to find captives to bring home and adopt to take the places of the dead.

There was shouting. She wanted to find out what it was, but couldn't get her muscles to respond. Someone threw back the hide
that covered the doorway, and she could see bright orange flames outside. There were dark silhouettes crossing the doorway, footsteps thudding on the packed earth outside the longhouse.

There were sounds of fighting. Then she saw fire fifty paces down the longhouse wall, licking up the elm bark wall on the inner side, beginning to reach the support laths. She rolled off the platform to the pounded earth floor and stood.

She looked around her, and saw the shapes of two children in the compartment across the hearth from hers—her cousin's children, a boy and a girl. "Where's your mother?" They said nothing, so she said, "Come on. Come with me."